Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Sloane scoffs, throwing her hands in the air. “I don’t have to be fair. My baby sister almost died, and Fenn has been lying about it for months! That’s shady, RJ. It’s shady!”
She’s not wrong. It doesn’t look good for my stepbrother. And it’s rotten luck that only Fenn was dumb enough to flash his face at the boathouse security camera. If we knew who drove out there with Casey in the first place, Fenn’s decision to flee after saving her would be a minor footnote to this entire ordeal. Something for the epilogue of the closed case. Instead, his actions that night, and every day since, appear more suspicious than heroic.
“I think you need to figure out where your loyalties lie.” She advances on me, dark gray eyes burning like hot ash. Indignant, she points a finger in my chest that would get my back up if she were anyone else.
“You know I can’t do that.”
I take her hand, which she quickly yanks back. These days, I give her an infinite amount of slack, considering the circumstances. But I’m not taking ultimatums either.
“Sloane, I love you, but there’s no way I’m taking sides between my girlfriend and my stepbrother. What he did is fucked up, yeah. But I’m sorry, I don’t think we should crucify the guy until we know the whole story.” I shrug. “At this point, I think you tell Casey and let her decide what to do.”
“No,” she says, clearly unsatisfied that I’m not on board to feed her revenge fantasies. She flicks up one eyebrow in challenge. “I’ll just tell my dad and we can go to the cops. They can figure it out.”
My shoulders tense. She wields the idea like a knife to my throat, and my patience is now waning. I want a way forward as much as she does, but throwing Fenn under the bus because we don’t have the real culprit is not an outcome I’m keen to entertain.
“I’m not standing in your way.” I sit on the bench and implore her to lower her weapons. “If that’s what you believe you have to do, that’s your right. But if you go that route, you need to understand that you could be blowing up Fenn’s entire life, maybe even taking away his freedom, without having all the details. If you’re not ready to fill Casey in yet, then at least let me talk to Fenn before you do anything else. Get him to admit the truth. Explain his side of things.”
Her lips tighten. “You know he’ll just lie to you.”
“No, I don’t know that. I think he’ll tell me the truth.”
Sloane meets my eyes for a moment. Long enough that the desire to swing on me fades. For now.
Reluctant, she sits beside me. “Let me see the footage again,” she orders.
On my phone, we rewatch the boathouse security footage from prom night. No matter how we zoom in or slow it down, Sloane can’t identify any clue to who it is we see fleeing the scene soon after the car careens off screen and into the lake. And she watches Fenn. How he races out of frame to pull Casey from the car, then returns to lay her gently on the ground. How he texts Sloane from her sister’s phone, proving those damn things actually are waterproof because it had been fully submerged.
“If he hadn’t texted, there’s no way we would have thought to look there,” she mutters.
The lake is a good distance from the Ballard Academy gym where Casey disappeared from the dance. Definitely not a trek anyone was taking on foot at night unless they knew the way. As Sloane described it, the boathouse was a place people went to drink, smoke, make out, or engage in whatever other illicit behaviors. AKA the last place anyone would think to look for a girl like Casey.
“We might not have found her for hours,” Sloane says, still clutching my phone in her hands. But I feel her icy fury thawing.
“Look, I can’t imagine what possessed Fenn to leave her there,” I say roughly, “or why he hasn’t come forward this whole time. But I think it’s obvious that when he went in the water, he was trying to do the right thing.”
Sloane chews on it for a while, her brow furrowed. She isn’t the forgiving type. My girlfriend is the kind of person who carries her grudges around in her pocket. Nurturing them. I’m not sure if she knows who she’d be without them. I get it. It was a monumental bit of character growth for her to find a way to forgive me for every mistake I made on my way to being with her now.
I just need her to stretch a little further.
“I hate you,” she says with a huff.